Children admitted to hospital with severe asthma attacks generally receive “very effective and efficient” treatment and care, but more attention must be given to asthma education and review at discharge to help prevent future attacks and readmission, says a national audit by the British Thoracic Society.

The society’s National Paediatric Asthma Audit, published on 29 November, reviewed data on more than 5500 children over the age of 1 admitted with severe asthma attacks to 153 UK hospitals in November 2015 and found that most aspects of discharge from hospital were less than optimal.

Please note, due to essential maintenance work on the trust’s IT systems, library computers will be unavailable at these times. See the message below for further details.

‘In order to progress the server 2003 replacement project, Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit IT Services will be carrying out essential maintenance work overnight on Wednesday 16th November from 22:00 until 10:00 on Thursday 17th November.

This will mean that between 10pm on Wednesday 16th November and 10am on Thursday 17th November, ALL of the trust’s IT systems will not be available and you will not have access to any IT systems during this time. This will affect ALL clinical and administrative applications including Extramed Cris, Pathology, Radiology, PAS and shared drives.’

Please contact Lynda Cotterill, Library Services Manager, on 01625 663923 if you have any questions about library computers.

Please note that the Library and Knowledge Service will not be staffed over this Bank Holiday weekend. You are still welcome to use the books, computers, self-service machine and other resources Saturday to Monday, using your staff badge to swipe into the building out of hours, but there will be no members of staff available for enquiries.

We will be available once again from 8.30am on Tuesday 1st September. We hope you have a good Bank Holiday!

We’d like to welcome 25 new people to East Cheshire who attended Corporate Induction yesterday, many of whom registered with the library. This included 5 new international nurses.

The Library and Knowledge Service is free and available to all of you to use: you can borrow books, use computers, ask for help with finding information for work, do e-learning, ask for training, or just come up and talk to us over a cup of coffee! If you haven’t already registered with us, you can do so any time you’re free!

All doctors who wish to work in the United Kingdom will have to sit a standard test to determine whether they are fit to practise, the General Medical Council has announced.

The test, called the UK medical licensing assessment (UKMLA), would replace the current Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board (PLAB) test taken by overseas medical graduates. However, UK trained graduates would also be expected to sit the test to gain a place on the medical register.

The Heatwave plan for England remains a central part of the Department of Health’s support to the NHS, social care and local authorities, providing guidance on how to prepare for and respond to a heatwave which can affect everybody’s health, but particularly the most vulnerable people in society.

Macclesfield’s Library and Knowledge Service has taken delivery of a new self-service machine. Once it is installed in about two weeks, library users will be able to use it to borrow, return and renew books, pay fines and check their accounts.

Why not contact the library for more information? Email ecn-tr.stafflibrary@nhs.net or phone 01625 661362, or drop in to see the machine for yourself!

Personal financial incentives help people to change health behaviours, but these effects are lost within three months of the payments stopping, says a study of the overall effect of payments across various health related behaviours.

Researchers analysed 34 studies including 10 585 adults that assessed the effect of financial incentives on a range of health behaviours, including smoking cessation and healthier eating, measured for at least six months from baseline.

Doctors in the United Kingdom have been urged to encourage patients to take small amounts of regular exercise and told that they have a leading role to play in reversing the growing contribution of sedentary lifestyles to chronic ill health.

More than 40% of adults do not reach the minimum recommended level of 30 minutes of moderately intense exercise five times a week, figures reviewed in the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges’ report showed.

If you work at Eagle Bridge Health and Wellbeing Centre in Crewe and you need help finding information for research, patient care or just to keep up to date, why not drop into the library on the second floor? Steve Collman, Community Outreach Librarian, will be available on the 12th of February all day to give you help and advice.

Welcome to the group of students in the library today, who were learning how to use Sharepoint and databases. The session was run by Elisa Dowey and Abe Ginourie of Chester University. Hopefully we’ll see some of you back soon for further library help and support!

A new organisation that aims to improve training for NHS staff is to be launched on Thursday. The employer-led National Skills Academy for Health (NSA Health) will support NHS trusts and organisations in providing training across a wide range of job fields.

One of its key goals will be to tackle the skills gap in the health service. Although not providing education itself, the academy will direct trusts and other employers to education providers in their own areas and offer some opportunities for e-learning.

Candace Miller, its director, said: “We were hearing real concerns from employers about the availability of good training and educational support for healthcare assistants and other groups in their areas. The creation of the NSA Health will attempt to address this gap.”

Many symptoms of cancer are non-specific, which makes diagnosis difficult. Cancers in childhood are rare and there are also potential barriers to communication during consultations. These are just some of the problems in this field – this module will help you overcome them. It highlights the potential difficulties with diagnosing children and young people with osteosarcomas and brain tumours, outlines red flag symptoms, and suggests approaches to addressing potential barriers to communication. See the link below.

Diagnosing osteosarcomas and brain tumours in children: communication skills – in association with the Department of Health

Also in this week’s edition are some modules on ENT disorders. They give an important update on a range of common dilemmas.

Health Minister Dr Dan Poulter has today announced a wide ranging series of measures to improve the training, values and education of all NHS staff over the next two years and beyond.

The measures have been published in the government’s mandate to Health Education England, a new arms-length body set up to give NHS training and education unprecedented focus and importance. It will be backed by £5 billion and will be accountable to ministers for delivering the goals set out in today’s document.

The details for the implementation of tariffs for education and training have been announced. By moving to a tariff based system for education and training, the Department of Health aim to enable a national approach to the funding of all clinical placements (both medical and non medical) and postgraduate medical programmes to support a level playing field between providers. Following this impact assessment, it has been agreed that the following will be implemented: tariffs for non medical placements and undergraduate medical placements in secondary care from 1 April 2013; tariffs for postgraduate medical training in secondary care from 1 April 2014.

The health system-and palliative care in particular-are facing difficult financial times due to spending cuts. It seems that when times are this hard one of the first things to go is staff education, which is disturbing considering that it takes years to train community palliative care nurses to function at specialist level.

Good teachers have a major influence on the quality and safety of medical care delivered to patients. As the area of sexual and reproductive health care (SRH) has evolved there has always been a strong commitment to supporting the development of sexual …

The next Health Matters public lecture will be held on Tuesday 5 February 2013, from 7-8pm, in the Lecture Theatre, Education & Training. The talk will be presented by Dr Rubina Japanwala, Consultant Orthogeriatrician, and is entitled “Bone Health Matters, or does it?”

The aim of the talk is to increase awareness to improve bone health and to prevent falls and fractures, and will give information about osteoporosis, falls, vitamin D, and fractures.
Dr Japanwala is also the Falls Lead for the Trust.

Members of staff are very welcome to attend this interesting talk. If you would like to attend please contact the Communications & Engagement Team on ext 1560 (01625 661560) or email us at ecn-tr.YourVoice@nhs.net.

NB:This article “Discrepancies in predicted fracture risk in elderly people” is published in the BMJ (Jan 2013) looks at calculators used to estimate fracture risk in elderly people which give widely different results. Mark Bolland and colleagues argue that treatment decisions should be based on calculators using 3-5 year estimates of risk. Click for full article

This briefing looks at how the creation of Health Education England and Local Education and Training Boards provides the opportunity for employers to ensure that the £5 billion annual national investment in education and training delivers the best possible patient outcome.

The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has launched a new National Early Warning Score (NEWS), to recognise very sick patients

A report on NEWS was produced by a multidisciplinary working group and clinical observation charts and e-learning materials have been provided by the NEWS educational programme, funded by the RCP, Royal College of Nurses (RCN), National Outreach Forum and NHS Training for Innovation.

On each acute hospital bed, a chart records patients’ pulse rate, blood pressure and temperature, but different NHS trusts use different types of chart, leading to a lack of consistency in the detection and response to acutely ill patients.

The more measurements vary from what would be expected, the higher the resultant score. These six scores are then aggregated into one overall score which, if high, will alert the medical or nursing team of the need to escalate a patient’s care.

RCP believes this provides the basis for a unified approach to assessment and continuous tracking of patients’ clinical care, standardised training of all staff and standardised data on regional variations in illness severity.

NEWS also provides detailed recommendations on actions for each score, and the e-learning materials aim to help trusts with implementation. NEWS has been evaluated against existing systems and proved to be as good as, or better, with greater sensitivity when triggering alerts.

A recent study of 1,000 adults dying in acute hospitals in England estimated that around one in 20 deaths in hospital, or 11,859, were preventable by improved clinical monitoring, fewer diagnostic errors and good drug or fluid management. Professor Bryan Williams, chair of the working party, estimated that around 50% of these deaths, 6,000, could have been prevented by using NEWS.

He said: “This new National Early Warning Score has the potential to transform patient safety in our hospitals and improve patient outcomes, it is hugely important.”

Professor Derek Bell, chair of the NEWS educational subgroup, said adopting NEWS would be “one of the most significant developments in health care in the next decade”.

And RCN director of nursing and service delivery, Janet Davies said: “There is nothing nurses and doctors should prioritise more than patient safety, and this system, if implemented across the board, will be a great leap forward for patient care.

“I hope that every Trust will read this report and adopt this system as soon as possible, as countless lives could be saved in the future by adopting this simple process.”

Skills for Care has developed end of life care qualifications in conjunction with a wide range of employers including Marie Curie Cancer Care, the UK Home Care Association and Barchester Care, in addition to a number of hospices.

The qualifications will help adult social care employers support the national end of life strategy. They also build on the work of common core competences and principles for end of life care.

Health Education England is the new national leadership organisation – ensuring that education, training, and workforce development drive the highest quality public health and patient outcomes.

The purpose of the new organisation is to ensure that the health workforce has the right skills, behaviours and training, and is available in the right numbers, to support the delivery of excellent healthcare and health improvement.

A series of webinars, aimed at NHS staff, are planned in June to produce an initial range of indicators for the five domains in the Education Outcomes Framework. Webinars will take place as follows: ‘Excellent education’ – 25 June, 11.00-12.00 ‘Competent and … Read more →